No Country for Women - Humanism, Secularism, Feminism

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list.

Taslima Nasreen was born in Bangladesh. She started writing when she was 13. Her writings won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India in 1992. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France, Le Prix de l' Edit de Nantes from the city of Nantes, France, Academy prize from the Royal Academy of arts, science and literature from Belgium. She is a Humanist Laureate in The International Academy for Humanism,USA. She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award, Germany,and Feminist Press Award, USA . She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of Lyon. She got honorary citizenship from Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Metz, Thionville, Esch etc. Taslima was awarded the Condorcet-Aron Prize at the “Parliament of the French Community of Belgium” in Brussels and Ananda literary award again in 2000.

Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar at Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009.

Taslima has written 40 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in thirty different languages. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. Because of her thoughts and ideas she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been prevented by the authorities from returning to her country since 1994, and to West Bengal since 2007.

A piece of coal in Gaza

Comments

Not only one time, there are hundreds of such incidents across Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It’s only news to those living in an insulated world of “embedded” (read: censored) reporting.

The link below contains similar pictures from Fallujah, many very graphic. View at one’s own risk.

Odds are, based upon prior experience, that until Hamas renounces the portions of their charter to kill Jews and destroy the state of Israel they are going to see more of that.

When an entire people is indoctrinated with … “death for the sake of Allah its most sublime belief” it is not possible to have lasting peace. When one side sees peace as a time to rearm and breed another generation of children to mold into weapons and props for the propaganda machine there can be no lasting peace. Only when they stop fetishizing their suffering, and that of their children, will they grasp the horror of what they do and allow themselves to feel the revulsion of what they have done will they learn to love their children more than they hate the Israelis.

It isn’t like this is likely to happen any time soon. So expect a lot more of this sort of thing.

Sad, very sad.

Sometimes reality sucks, but it is always best to look it square in the eyes.

Nature and nurture. I firmly believe that humans are genetically predisposed to being social and do so by having a self-generated and natural sense of empathy, understanding, compromise and cooperation. Unfortunately children can be nurtured to reject and contradict those tendencies.

This child would, had he or she lived, gone to school and been otherwise indoctrinated to hate Jews and Israel. To see the goal of killing Jews and destroying Israel as a value higher than their own life and to want to promote that view in their own children and surrounding society.

Hamas has established its ability to shape the Palestinian society through media, propaganda, rumor control and patriotic parades. You have to love the the parades with both young children and men all wearing mock ups of black suicide vests, complete with bright red sticks of fake dynamite, and row after row of fake rockets. All set to lively music and accompanied by the distribution of candy.

Those it cannot shift through a lighter touch it shifts, or eliminates with a heavier hand. Those who fail to cooperate with sufficient enthusiasm or dissent too loudly from the party line are labeled collaborator, traitor, and are killed. A good number have their bodies paraded around in public, suffer mutilation, and are displayed. What is it with this culture?

The chances of that child growing up anything but pro-Hamas are slim to none. The range of options open are between tacit support and passive cooperation with Hamas and active and enthusiastic cooperation and support.

Unfortunately the flower of innocence and inherent humanity expressed by the potential within that child fell onto the hard, doctrine rich soil of Gaza. The characteristic tenderness of the flower will inevitable be replaced by hate and a love of violence.

Yes, Israel has been tough on the Palestinians. But he Palestinians have also been hard of Palestinians. Vastly increasing the birth rate in such a limited space makes everything harder. The combination of Hamas and Wahhabi Islam, both of which: fedishise death and violence for the greater good, promote rigid fundamentalist thinking, and view citizens as resources to be used and expended by the organization for political or territorial gain.

In the picture we see a man holding up the ‘bloody shirt’ to gin up popular support and resentment. Emotions which will be channeled and put to work to support Hamas and radical Islam. Even in death the child is being used for propaganda purposes. Similarly Palestinian women are encouraged to put on histrionic displays of grief and outrage. Some of this is so deeply inculcated that it has become automatic but sometimes it is clearly and obviously street theater.

“This child would, had he or she lived, gone to school and been otherwise indoctrinated to hate Jews and Israel. To see the goal of killing Jews and destroying Israel as a value higher than their own life and to want to promote that view in their own children and surrounding society.”

Pure speculation on your part. You have no idea what that child would have grown up to feel, think or believe.

“Similarly Palestinian women are encouraged to put on histrionic displays of grief and outrage.”

Are you seriously suggesting that their grief — at witnessing the brutal deaths of loved ones — is just acting? Do you really consider Palestinians to be so unhuman that they don’t even experience real sadness when their children are senselessly blown to bits? I know that if I helplessly watched my family die, to be left only with their charred and mangled half-bodies amid the rubble of our once-home, I’d be beyond “histrionic” with “grief and outrage” — no “encouragement” required. Is it that hard to accept that Palestinians would express those same emotions? Smh.

I was 16 when I got the message that my father had died. I remember the paralyzing grief as my heart dropped into my bowels, and my legs literally gave out before the caller even finished the sentence. Lying on the floor, the wailing followed. Even recalling the emotion seven years later, I feel the echoes of the deepening despair that overtook me then. What if my father hadn’t died from a medical condition, but from a horrific bombing? What if I had witnessed the demolition and had tried in vain to put the pieces of him back together? What if not only he had died this way, but also my brother and sister? I can’t even imagine how hysterical I would have been. I’m not sure I could ever come back from that.